Price Oracle Manipulation
Price oracle manipulation involves artificially altering the data fed to a smart contract to deceive it regarding the current market value of an asset. Since many decentralized finance protocols rely on decentralized price feeds, attackers use flash loans to create extreme temporary volatility on a low-liquidity exchange.
This skewed price is then reported by the oracle, causing the target protocol to calculate incorrect collateral ratios or asset valuations. Attackers exploit this discrepancy to drain funds, mint excess tokens, or liquidate positions that should have remained solvent.
Secure protocols prevent this by using decentralized, aggregated, or time-weighted price sources that are harder to influence with single-transaction volume spikes.